AIRSHIFUMI: How an R&D experience won January 2021’s most prestigious prizes
Awarded “Website of the Month” on CSS Design Awards, FWA, and “Site of the day” on Awwwards, AirShifumi has been the talk of the month (Take 3 minutes to play it yourself!). Winning these prizes means that we are starting 2021 with a hit: at the end of January, our AI-driven, interactive experience is already one of the 12 sites that will define the year. We are really proud of the warm welcome of the creative community towards AirShifumi, but we know we deserve it. AirShifumi is a poetic answer to today’s emotional turmoil.
Physical distance and digital proximity
It’s been a tough year that has brought a lot of profound changes to the way we interact as a society. We’ve been separated for almost a year now with no ending in sight. Over time, this physical isolation has created new online uses to try and feel close again. We organized digital alternatives for our social activities and found new ways to create group dynamics — from Houseparty after working hours to digital dance clubs. Digital has been a lifeline to join people together again and mend lost proximity. AirShifumi is the answer to this void. As Zoom meetings have replaced drinks with friends, we wanted to provide a space to feel close again. We provided a reason to get lost together in a dreamlike universe and to explore new ways to interact — through a screen, but closer than ever.
Transcending our relation to gaming
Brands have been playing with the gaming universe lately — some as a way to explore new codes and maybe attract new communities, others as a bold statement to push the limits of brand perception, challenging their brand territories themselves. While diving headfirst in gaming-inspired campaigns that appeal both to nostalgia and winning spirit, Balenciaga has been interacting with its communities on twitch, the live stream platform powered by popular players. This challenges the stigma we have of gaming that seems to still lay around amongst some populations: gaming is for everyone. Luxury brands are having a field day with interactive experiences and reinterpretations of classical games, like Burberry’s B bounce, to appeal to an always broader audience that knows no limit of age or gender. With AirShifumi, we created an immersive universe around the gestures that are most likely to link us together. Far from the go-to 8bit aesthetics of others, we have taken the principle of gaming to its roots: how do you immerse players in a different reality, for minutes or hours? What stories are they about to live? As an answer, AirShifumi offers a playful and meditative experience to answer.
Cutting-edge technology for human emotion
We’ve long past the point of defiance towards machines, to finally embrace the emotion they can provide. The Rijksmuseum proved it time and time again by appropriating best-in-class technology to play with their artworks. Artificial Intelligence has the legitimacy of real interaction. Learning as it goes, AirShifumi adapted to its opponents and provided the emotion of a close-by encounter with strangers.
Months of training and countless reworks have allowed the experience to provide one simple message to its players: ‘We are still together’. It was true for the development of the project: from across the world, working remotely, or together in a room.
This R&D project that aimed to test new ways of interacting with each other in times of distancing ended up being our project held most at heart, and our latest best achievement, as we put it into the world for everyone to play with. And the welcome was as good as we hoped: we accumulated 60k visits since mid-January, with an average of 1’30’’ spent on the platform, proving that visitors did appropriate our exploration of new frontiers. Mostly, it taught us to keep on pushing limits: always shake further.
